Restless (8 page)

'Eva!' The sound of running footsteps.

She turned: it was Romer, a little out of breath, his wiry hair tousled. He slowed, composed himself, ran a hand across his head.

'Very good,' he said. 'I thought the red scarf was a masterstroke. Make yourself conspicuous – tremendous.'

Her disappointment was like a bitter taste in her throat. 'But how did you-'

'I was cheating. I was close. Always. Nobody knew.' He stood in front of her now. 'I'll show you how to do a close follow. You need more props – specs, a false moustache.' He took one out of his pocket, and out of his other a flat tweed cap. 'But you were very good, Eva. Nearly shook me off.' He was grinning his white smile. 'Didn't you like the room at the North British? Jenners was tricky – the Ladies, nice touch. A few outraged Edinburgh maidens, there, I'm afraid. But I knew there must be a back way out because you'd never have gone in.'

'I see.'

He looked at his watch. 'Let's go up here. I've booked lunch. You like oysters, don't you?'

They ate lunch in a decoratively tiled oyster bar attached to a public house. Oysters, she thought, the symbol of our relationship. Perhaps he believes they're a genuine aphrodisiac and I'll like him better? As they sat and talked Eva found herself looking at Romer with as much objectivity as she could muster, trying to imagine what she would have thought of him if they hadn't been thrown together in this curious and alarming way – if Kolia's death had never happened. There
was
something attractive about him, she supposed: something both urgent and laconically mysterious – he was a kind of spy after all – and there was his rare transforming smile – and his massive self-confidence. She concentrated: he was praising her again, saying how everyone at Lyne was impressed by her dedication, her aptitude.

'But what's it all for?' she said, blurting the question out.

'I'll explain everything once you're finished,' he said. 'You'll come down to London and meet the unit, my team.'

'You have your own unit?'

'Let's say a small subdivision of an annexe to a subsidiary element linked to the main body.'

'And what does your unit do?'

'I wanted to give you these,' he said, not answering, and reached into his breast pocket, removing an envelope that turned out to contain two passports. She opened them: there was her same shadowy-eyed photograph, blurry and stiffly formal, but the names were different: now she was Margery Allerdice and Lily Fitzroy.

'What're these for? I thought I was Eve Dalton.'

He explained. Everyone who worked for him, who was in his unit, was given three identities. It was a perk, a bonus – to be used or not used as the recipient saw fit. Think of them as a couple of extra parachutes, he said, a couple of getaway cars parked near by if you ever felt the need to use them one day. They can be very handy, he said, and it saves a lot of time if you have them already.

Eva put her two new passports in her handbag and for the first time felt a little creep of fear climb up her spine. Following-games in Edinburgh were one thing; clearly whatever Romer's unit did was potentially dangerous. She clipped her handbag shut.

'Are you allowed to tell me more about this unit of yours?'

'Oh, yes. A bit. It's called AAS,' he said. 'Almost an embarrassing acronym, I know, but it stands for Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'

'Very boring.'

'Exactly.'

And she thought, suddenly, that she did like Romer – liked his brand of cleverness, his way of second-guessing everything. He ordered a brandy for himself. Eva wanted nothing more.

'I'll give you another piece of advice,' he said. 'In fact I'll always be giving you advice – tips – from time to time. You should try to remember them.'

She suddenly disliked him again: the self-satisfaction, the
amour propre,
were sometimes just too much. I am the cleverest man in the world and all I have to deal with are you poor fools.

'Find yourself a safe house. Somewhere. Wherever you happen to be for any length of time, have a safe house, a personal one. Don't tell me, don't tell anyone. Just a place you can be sure of going to, where you can be anonymous, where you can hide, if need be.'

'Romer's rules,' she said. 'Any more?'

'Oh, there are plenty more,' he said, not picking up the irony in her voice, 'but as we're on the subject, I'll tell you the most important rule. Rule number one, never to be forgotten.'

'Which is?'

'Don't trust anyone,' he said, without any portentousness, but with a kind of mundane confidence and certainty, as if he had said 'Today is Friday'. 'Don't trust anyone, ever,' he repeated and took out a cigarette and lit it, thinking, as if he'd managed to surprise himself by his acuity. 'Maybe it's the only rule you need. Maybe all the other rules I'll tell you are just versions of this rule. "The one and only rule". Don't trust anyone – not even the one person you think you can trust most in this world. Always suspect. Always mistrust.' He smiled, not his warm smile. 'It'll stand you in excellent stead.'

'Yes, I'm learning that.'

He drank the rest of his brandy down in a one-er. He drank quite a lot, she'd noticed, in her few encounters with Romer.

'We'd better get you back to Lyne,' he said, calling for the bill.

At the door they shook hands. Eva said she could catch a bus home easily enough. She thought he was looking at her more intently than usual and she remembered that she had her hair down – he's probably never seen me with my hair down, she thought.

'Yes… Eva Delectorskaya,' he said, musingly, as if he had other things on his mind. 'Who would've thought?' He reached out as if to pat her shoulder and then decided against it. 'Everyone's very pleased. Very.' He looked up at the afternoon sky with its great building clouds, grey, laden, threatening. 'War next month,' he said, in the same bland tone, 'or the next. The big European war.' He looked back and smiled at her. 'We shall do our bit,' he said, 'don't worry.'

'In the Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'

'Yes… Ever been to Belgium?' he asked suddenly.

'Yes. I went to Brussels once. Why?'

'I think you might like it. Bye, Eva.' He gave her a half salute, half wave and sauntered away. Eva could hear him whistling. She turned and walked thoughtfully to the bus station.

Later, as she sat in the waiting-room, waiting for the bus to Galashiels, she found herself looking at the other occupants of the small room also waiting for their buses – the men and women, and the few children. She was examining them, evaluating them, assessing them, placing them. And she thought: if only you knew, if only you knew who I was and what I did. Then she caught herself, almost exclaiming with surprise. She realised suddenly that everything had indeed changed, that she was now looking at the world in a different way. It was as if the nervous circuits in her brain had altered, as if she'd been rewired, and she knew that her lunch with Romer had marked both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. She understood now, with almost distressing clarity, that for the spy the world and its people were different than they were for everybody else. With a small tremor of alarm and, she had to admit, with a small tremor of excitement, she realised in that Edinburgh waiting-room that she was looking at the world around her as a spy would. She thought about what Romer had said, about his one and only rule, and she thought: was this the spy's particular, unique fate – to live in a world without trust? She wondered if she would ever be capable of trusting anyone again.

I WOKE EARLY, DISTURBED and angry after my familiar dream – the dream where I'm dead and I'm watching Jochen cope with life without me – usually perfectly and completely happily. I started to have this dream after he began to talk and I resent my subconscious mind drawing this deep worry, this sick neurosis, to my attention every now and then. Why am I dreaming of my own death? I never dream of Jochen's death, though sometimes I think about it, rarely, for a second or two before I banish it – shocked – from my mind. I'm almost sure that everyone does this about the people they love – it's a grim corollary of truly loving someone: you find yourself compelled to imagine your world without them and have to contemplate its awfulness and dread for a second or two. A peer through the crack to the emptiness, the big silence beyond. We can't help it – I can't help it, anyway, and I tell myself guiltily that everybody must do it, that it's a very human reaction to the human condition. I hope I'm right.

I slipped out of bed and padded through to his bedroom, to check on him. He was sitting up in bed, colouring in his colouring book, a fritter of pencils and wax crayons around him.

I gave him a kiss and asked him what he was drawing.

'A sunset,' he said, and showed me the lurid page, all flaming orange and yellow, capped with bruised brooding purples and greys.

'It's a bit sad,' I said, my mood still influenced by my dream.

'No it's not, it's meant to be beautiful.'

'What would you like for breakfast?' I asked him.

'Crispy bacon, please.'

I opened the door to Hamid – he wasn't wearing his new leather jacket, I noticed, just his black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, very crisp, like an airline pilot. Normally I'd have teased him about this but I thought that after my
faux pas
of the day before and the fact that Ludger was in the kitchen behind me it would be best to be pleasant and kind.

'Hamid, hello! Beautiful morning!' I said, my voice full of special cheer.

'The sun is shining again,' he said in a monotone.

'So it is, so it is.'

I turned and showed him in. Ludger was sitting there at the kitchen table in T-shirt and shorts, spooning cornflakes into his mouth. I could tell what Hamid was thinking – his insincere smile, his stiffness – but there was no possibility of explaining the reality behind this situation with Ludger in the room, so I opted for a simple introduction.

'Hamid, this is Ludger, a friend of mine from Germany. Ludger – Hamid.'

I had not introduced them the day before. I had gone down to the front door, brought Ludger up to the flat, installed him in the sitting-room and continued – with some difficulty – with Hamid's lesson. After Hamid was finished and gone I went to find Ludger – he was stretched out on the sofa, asleep.

Now Ludger raised his clenched fist and said,
'Allahu Akbar.'

'You remember Ludger,' I said, brightly. 'He came yesterday, during our lesson.'

Hamid's face registered no emotion. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said.

'Shall we go through?' I said.

'Please, yes, after you, Ruth.'

I led him through to the study. He seemed very unlike his usual self: solemn, almost agonised in some way. I noticed he had had his beard trimmed – it made him look younger.

'So,' I said, continuing with the false breeziness, sitting down at my desk, 'I wonder what the Ambersons are up to today.'

He ignored me. 'This Ludger man,' he said, 'is he the father of Jochen?'

'No! Good God, no. What made you think that? No – he's the brother of Jochen's father, the younger brother of Karl-Heinz. No, no, absolutely no.' I laughed, with nervous relief, realising I'd said 'no' six times. No denial could have been more underscored.

Hamid tried to disguise how happy he was at this news, but failed. His grin was almost stupid.

'Oh. All right. No, I thought he…' he paused, held up both his hands in apology. 'Forgive me, I should not induct like this.'

'Deduce.'

'Deduce. So: he is Jochen's uncle.'

This was true, but I had to admit I had never thought of Ludger Kleist in this way (he didn't seem remotely avuncular – the words 'Uncle Ludger' conjoined appeared creepily antithetical) and, indeed, I had also introduced Ludger to Jochen as 'a friend from Germany' – and they had had no time to become better acquainted as I had to take Jochen to a birthday party. Ludger said he would go 'to a pub' and by the time he returned that evening Jochen was in bed. The uncle-revelation would have to wait.

Ludger was dossing down on a mattress on the floor of a room in the flat we called the Dining Room – in honour of the one dinner party I had given there since we had moved in. It was, in fact, and in theory, the room where I wrote my thesis. Its oval table was stacked with books and notes and drafts of my various chapters. I allowed myself to believe, contrary to the dusty evidence, that this was the room where I worked on my thesis – its very existence, its designation and compartmentalisation seemed to make my wishes somehow real, or more real: this was where my calm, scholarly, intellectual life took place – my messy disorganised real life occupied the rest of the flat. The Dining Room was my discrete little cell of mental endeavour. I dispelled the illusion quickly: we pushed the table to the wall; we laid down Ludger's inflatable mattress on the carpet – it had become a spare room again – one Ludger professed himself to be very comfortable in.

'If you could see where I have been sleeping,' he said, pulling down the bottom eyelid of his right eye with a finger, as if to exemplify a basilisk stare. 'Jesus Christ, Ruth, this is the Ritz.' And then he gave his crazy shrill laugh that I remembered better than I wished.

Hamid and I settled down with the Ambersons. Keith Amberson couldn't get his car started and the family were about to go on holiday to Dorset. Lots of conditional-perfect verbs. I could hear Ludger moving from the kitchen through the flat.

'Is Ludger staying long?' Hamid asked. Clearly Ludger was on both our minds.

'I don't think so,' I said, realising that in fact I had still to ask.

'You said you thought he was dead. Was it in an accident?'

I decided to tell Hamid the truth. 'I was told that he had been shot by the West German police. But obviously not.'